The Core Issue: Emotional Reactivity

An exploration of flower essences to support uncontrollable reactions to life events

emotional reactivity

involuntary and usually overly intense reaction to an external emotional stimulus, which often leads to feeling victimized by your emotions

an opportunity for repressed emotion to inform you of its existence

Emotions are an important part of your being. They can give you important information, change relationships, and keep life from feeling mundane or boring. Powerful emotions can also sometimes spring forth and leave you feeling overwhelmed and drained.

Many events and situations in life provoke emotional reactivity, some of which feels great and others not so much. How can we recognize and deal with what has provoked emotional reactivity?

Emotional response is a feeling that is felt and then either acted upon or not, depending on what you choose. Your boyfriend says he loves you and you have a strong feeling as a result. Your boss gives you a promotion and you feel recognized. Your sister ignores your birthday and you feel hurt and disregarded.

Emotional reactivity, on the other hand, means you have an uncontrollable reaction to a stimulus. Instead of being able to respond to an event, your emotions may spring forth with intensity. Emotional reactivity often takes you out of your comfort zone and you might even feel victimized by your intense feelings. After all, they could spring up at any moment and leave you feeling helpless to them.

You may have emotional reactions of varying intensity according to what is happening for you in the present and what happened to you in the past. When you are very stressed out or when you have unprocessed emotions from the past, your reactivity to a given situation may increase in intensity. When your life is more balanced and you are current with processing your emotions, your reactivity level is usually lessened.

Emotional reactivity is a part of life, of being human. With one or more of the following flower essences you can help deal with times when you are triggered, find inner acceptance and emotional stability.

What IS This Feeling?

When you are emotionally reactive, you may feel out of your depth. Your mind may start judging you for having had an uncontrollable reaction. Internal self-abuse begins and it is hard to get out of its rut.

Being aware of your emotions is an important part of self-awareness. The Emotional Awareness Formula is excellent for helping you to recognize what you are feeling. This is the essence of choice for being aware that you have a feeling and then being able to identify its source.

The Emotional Awareness Formula helps you move from your mind into the feeling level of awareness. It helps you perceive your emotions without judging and controlling them with your mind. It is excellent for excessively intellectual people or for when your mind takes over and starts running the show. The formula inspires you to stay present, centered and aware, allowing you to look at and identify your feelings.

Accepting Your Humanness

Once you identify your feelings, you may have difficulty accepting the fact that you have them. This is especially true if you tend to compare yourself to some ideal of how you should be. The Embracing Humanness Formula is wonderful support for helping you accept being a human being.

Humans are not tidy packages that always respond in acceptable ways. We have messy feelings, sometimes ones that we wish we didn't. However, we are all created just as we are, a manifestation of the Creator's wish for us to be here now. This composite formula helps you come to that understanding so that it becomes perfectly fine to have whatever emotions arise within.

Out of Proportion Reactivity

Sometimes you may have an emotional reaction to a situation that is all out of proportion to the actual situation. Your buttons get pushed. You can see that your emotions are much more intense than the interaction would normally cause, yet your feelings are nonetheless powerful. Even if you suspect that your feelings are the result of some earlier situation, how can you tell where they are really coming from?

Ocotillo flower essence helps us with just that, by bringing insight into the source of a feeling and helping us accept it. Unresolved feelings from your past can often leave you triggered by a present-time event. It's as if a situation in the present becomes fertile ground for healing or resolving what you were not able in the past.

When unconscious or unexpressed feeling erupt in this way, you may feel victimized by the intensity of your emotional reaction. After all, how do you know when this type of eruption might inconveniently occur again? Ocotillo helps you recognize the feeling's source and accept yourself for having had the feeling. It supports you in being able to feel your feelings and not feel victimized by them. Ocotillo helps you feel capable of responding, rather than reacting to a situation.

Old Patterns of Avoidance

Bouvardia has a great gift for us in the arena of emotional reactivity. Many of us learned to avoid our feelings, to tuck them safely away, so that we could deal with life. This is a form of self-protection that quite likely used to keep you safe in unstable situations.

Old protective patterns of dealing with feelings become out-dated as we mature and learn to deal with feelings and other people appropriately. The pattern of whisking the feelings aside and avoiding them, however, may still be alive and active within you.

Bouvardia helps you if you have a tendency to avoid direct, conscious confrontation with emotionally difficult issues. There are times when it really is better to confront a situation or person and stand in the truth of your emotional reality.

The essence fosters calm, clear thinking, unclouded by emotional reactivity. It helps fortify your determination and will to confront life directly and consciously. It has a very grounding effect, stimulating your attention and sensory awareness to the immediate present, and redirecting avoidance patterns to positive response and action.

Emotional Over-zealousness

Some of us live from our emotional bodies. What I mean by that is that we may feel everything with an intensity that is pretty overwhelming to others around us. For some of us, it is a tendency we have had since childhood. If you were the one who expressed your feelings the loudest, you might have received more attention for it.

For others, it is a habit that you may acquire later in life. It might start when you get in touch with old, unresolved feelings. It is easy to fall into this pattern of intensity. Allowing ourselves to fully feel our feelings, especially ones that had been pent up for years, can result in a habit of overdoing it. You throw yourself so much into the feeling that your awareness resides too much in your emotions.

In either case, feeling your feelings with an exaggerated intensity triggers adrenaline, that lovely internal drug that helps you feel alive and excited. The more intensely you express your feelings, the more alive you feel, but the more you lose contact with your physical body.

Melon Loco is a flower essence that can help stop the pattern of over doing it. It helps emotional over-zealousness. It steps down the intensity of your emotions in order to bring you back into alignment with your body. It creates a wonderful balance if you tend to overdo it.

Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences

Not every flower essence mentioned above will be appropriate for every person's specific needs. Different people have different issues. Usually, careful self-examination can clearly show you which of the above flower essences are most appropriate for you.

Though you can use more than one flower essence together, you probably will not need to use all of the ones mentioned here. After contemplating your relationship to this issue, select the flower essences that apply for you, or use an intuitive method to select among them. (For more information on how to do this, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.) A general guideline is to use four drops at a time, four times a day, in water. However, it is fine to follow your intuition and use them as often as you like. Most people find that they tend to use them more often in the beginning and less often towards the end of the cycle. Unless otherwise indicated, a cycle is usually two to four weeks. [more]